I was impressed by the build quality of their new T91MT touch-screen tablet, and it was definitely an all-around improvement on the older version of that model (the T91, which came with Windows XP and didn't have multitouch). I just wish they offered a handheld touch-screen computer in a screen size slightly larger than 8.9 inches. If they could release this one with a touch screen that swiveled around to lay down flat on top of the keyboard, that'd be perfect! We need such devices to deploy our software product on, and Gibabyte makes a 10-inch one, but even with the nearly full-sized keyboard, it was nowhere near as compelling a user experience as the ASUS.

How fun to see South Texas College of Law in the news! I used to check my email in the library there when I recently worked in downtown Houston, because the multinational financial firm that laid me off had locked down access to Gmail and Facebook and Evite and all other sugar and spice in the online world. Nothing like those mid-afternoon breaks of walking a block to the school and getting a cappuccino out of their coffee machine and staring out the nice big windows of their library!

After a quick download from http://www.drjava.org/ you can start using the super lightweight IDE that I frequently turn to, partly because you can evaluate Java statements on-the-fly with the interpreter behind its handy Interactions Pane. You can interact with code in a compiled class or just start interacting with any lines of code you type immediately. It's really easy to get some code going without the bulk of something like Eclipse (which I generally use for all larger projects). I may be a bit biased since Dr. Java was created by folks from Rice University, my alma mater, but I genuinely find it more useful than other lightweight IDEs specifically because of the Interactions Pane. It's been around for nearly a decade and the latest release was earlier this month!

I'm surprised nobody poked fun at the author's Nigerian connections! He is in fact a son of the recent president of Nigeria, and one of my friends used to live with him at a military secondary school (Air Force). I've read some of his blog posts ever since a fellow Rice student told me Dare was an intern on his team at Microsoft (some half a dozen years ago, I think), and he has always struck me as someone who has wanted to make his mark by working hard on his own rather than by harnessing his privileged past.